The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  He and Dinithi set up the barrier while standing in the pool. They released it, let it hit the ground and roll into place. He used the largest barrier they had for this pool, even though the specs called for a smaller one.

  The barrier worked like a net. Water flowed through it, but humans caught in the undertow would hit the barrier and not get sucked under the Falls. Even so, it was difficult to get someone free of the water when they hit the barrier.

  This particular barrier was his favorite, because it had a detachable section that could wrap around a diver, roll up, and yank the diver toward the shore.

  The pool was so small here that the detachable section would get the diver to shallow water, where he could simply walk up and out of the area.

  It still wasn’t perfect, but it worked. He’d seen people survive who would have normally been sucked under the Falls and died. Whereas, he had seen more people than he wanted to think about die because they’d actually gone under the Falls.

  He knew only one person who had survived a slip underneath the Falls, and that had been him.

  It wasn’t an experience he ever wanted to repeat.

  The waterfall churned to his right. The water bubbled and foamed, pushing downward or outward or upward, shimmering and forming different colors as it moved.

  From underneath, the Falls looked like clouds, coming in with a big wind behind them, building, and threatening storms of such severity that everything in the Sandoveil Valley would be obliterated.

  If he ever saw clouds like that in the sky, he would run for cover. Here, there was no cover. Just the barrier.

  This moment—this first moment when he saw the waterfall from underneath—always activated his fight-or-flight response. The suit noticed his panic, and warned him that he could not remain at this elevated level of adrenaline for very long.

  He ignored that because he knew that, dramatic as it was, he would be able to stop focusing on the Falls in a very short period of time.

  He started ignoring the Falls now, as he swam toward the rock formation they had seen with the probe.

  He suspected, given the position of that body, that there wasn’t much of an undertow there, but he had been wrong about rock formations before. He wasn’t going to be wrong here. He was going in with caution.

  He had briefed his team about the dangers of working with rock formations so close to churning water.

  And now Hranek had thrown in his little orders, as if the pool really were calm and Tevin’s team could walk in and out carrying rocks.

  Tevin would bring only the rocks that looked important. If they were worth carrying. It didn’t matter how much Hranek bitched. Tevin would make the decision based on the degree of danger to himself and his team.

  He could feel the waterfall. It was like a drumbeat, constant and insistent, the vibration so strong that he could hear it, even through the suit and the water. In fact, the water probably amplified it.

  The initial adrenaline had calmed. His suit stopped yelling at him to return to base. (It still thought it was in space: He had never changed that aspect of the suit. He would never go to space, but he loved the default language usage on the suit. It made him feel more worldly than he was.)

  He glanced at his diving partners. They had dived near the Falls before as well, which reassured him. Everyone on his team had done practice dives in the bigger, easier-to-access part of Rockwell Pool. The safer pool.

  But that way, he knew that his team understood the dangers and the risks of a dive like this.

  Both women swam to his left. Novoa was the closest to him because she had worked in this pool before, although never at this depth. Dinithi had helped retrieve the first body, but not anything else. She was the one he was most concerned about.

  He and Dinithi and Novoa had tested their comms before they left together to do this dive. Technically, he should have checked the comms one more time as the three of them descended, but he hadn’t wanted to. He knew how much work it was to get his attitude right, with the Falls pounding beside him, and he felt it was safer to bring himself into focus.

  Because he and the women were searching for anything unusual, they had all of their suit lights on, from the focused lights on the palms of their gloves to the diffuse lights all over their legs and torso. He also had a hood light, but he kept that a little dimmer than the women did. The hood light irritated his eyes, particularly as the silt flowed around him.

  The pile of rocks showed up almost immediately. He should have expected that: It took less time for a human to cross a short span of water than it did for a small probe to do that.

  The rocks seemed even more jagged than they had through the cameras, and his earlier observation had been correct: There was no visible sediment on the rocks at all. He couldn’t see the necklace that had started all of this, though, partly because the water was so dark here, and partly because of the sediment.

  His eyes weren’t as fine an instrument as the probe had been.

  “All right,” Dinithi said through the comm, startling him. “Consider this the final comm check.”

  “Check,” Novoa said.

  “Check,” Tevin said.

  “Now,” Dinithi said, apparently thinking that Tevin wasn’t going to take control of the dive without some prompting. “How does Hranek want us to proceed? Rocks first?”

  Tevin suppressed a sigh. Dinithi had believed Hranek when he said he was in charge.

  “You’ll follow my lead underwater,” Tevin said before Marnie could cut in. He prayed she didn’t have Hranek attached to their comm system, because that would piss Tevin off to no end. He never liked the man, but after this morning’s display, Tevin was starting to loathe him.

  “Sorry,” Dinithi said, apparently taking that as a rebuke to her, not to Hranek.

  “No need to apologize. I’ll keep us structured,” Tevin said. “So, to answer your question, we’re going to follow standard procedure. We’re going to examine the entire area, then figure out how to handle the body. If we need to move rocks, that’s when we’ll discuss those.”

  “Got it,” Dinithi said. He wanted to believe she sounded relieved.

  He paused, treading water, and the women paused beside him. He took in the entire structure.

  The rocks weren’t a formation like he had initially thought, at least, not at the top. The bottom was in a well that he had noticed on a previous dive. The well was deep, part of a trench that centuries of water coming off the mountain had carved into the ground.

  Even though he trained his light downward, he couldn’t see the bottom of that trench. He knew that some geologist at Sandoveil University had done a lot of work in these pools. He also knew the geologist had research on file with the YSR-SR, so someone probably knew the depth of this trench.

  In fact, Zhou probably did, but they had elected to leave him on shore with the equipment.

  For a moment, Tevin was tempted to ask Zhou to research the depth of the trench, then decided that could wait.

  They just needed to see what they were dealing with first.

  “Let’s start with this side,” Tevin said. “Let’s go as deep as this thing will let us. In tandem.”

  In tandem for this team meant that they worked side by side. With beginners, he would have had them rope together or hold hands, but the two of them, as experienced as they were, only needed to be told.

  They fell into a rhythm automatically, fanning out slightly so that they covered the entire rock pile, but remaining at the exact same level and in almost the same position as they worked their way down.

  He turned on the lights on his shoulders and aimed them at the rocks. Novoa brightened her hood light, and Dinithi lit up every focused light they had.

  The rocks came into clearer focus as the three of them increased the light. And it became evident almost immediately that the rocks were less of a formation and more of a pile.

  The upper layer of the pile contained the body. The arms floated like seaweed.
/>
  “I don’t like this,” Novoa said. “It’s weird.”

  They had all been cautioned, back when they were brought in to the YSR-SR, to be as clear as they could when they were on comms because comms could be part of the public record.

  But weird was pretty accurate. And if need be, he would reinforce that on the record.

  The rock pile was huge. It disappeared into the trench. He couldn’t tell if it rested on top of an existing formation, but the idea of that made him frown.

  If the trench hadn’t been carved by the waterfall, then it was some kind of ancient lava trench or a split in the ground that had formed around something else. He barely remembered the geology he had studied in school, but the one thing he had learned since he joined the YSR-SR was that the sector base would never have been built beneath the Payyer Mountain Range if it had been an active volcanic range. It was simply too dangerous.

  There was—according to Fleet geologists of several centuries ago—no chance that lava could burble up from beneath the ground and change the formation of these rocks.

  “What the hell is this?” Dinithi asked as they swam deeper.

  They still had nearly fifty feet to go before they reached the lip of the trench. Tevin’s suit informed him of the increasing pressure.

  And oddly, the farther down he went, the quieter the waterfall seemed. The vibration had eased, at least a little. He suspected that, if he looked up, the water storm would seem very far away.

  “You seeing this?” he asked Marnie.

  “Yeah,” she responded, quicker than he expected. “In 2D it makes very little sense. What are you all exclaiming about?”

  He didn’t want to explain anything to her right now. He needed to focus on the dive.

  “Just ask Jabari if this could be an avalanche zone,” Tevin said.

  Dinithi whipped her head toward him, as hard as the water allowed. The movement sent her backward and sideways and almost over the lip of the trench.

  In fact, she would have gone over the lip if Novoa hadn’t also seen the movement and caught Dinithi’s arm. It took a visible effort for Novoa to pull her closer.

  “Bad current?” Tevin asked.

  “Yeah,” Novoa said. “We have to stay back from the edge of that trench.”

  He wasn’t feeling it on this side of the rock pile, so he suspected he had missed the current altogether.

  “Tevin, Jabari here,” Zhou said, even though Tevin would have recognized his voice anywhere. Zhou identified himself more for the record than he did for Tevin. “Mushtaq and I are measuring now, and looking at some historical records—”

  Mushtaq? Tevin had no idea who that was. Then he realized that had to be Hranek. Wonderful. He didn’t want Hranek involved, although he had no real choice.

  “—we don’t know definitively if you’re in an avalanche area, but judging from your location, it would be unusual to have an avalanche pile there.”

  “Even from really high?” Dinithi asked. “Like one of the areas of the overlooks, maybe?”

  “Some rocks would bounce outward, yes, but have you watched an avalanche?” Zhou asked.

  Tevin stopped swimming forward. He indicated with his hands that the women should stop too. They were treading water, the light from their equipment illuminating the rocks.

  “Not in person,” Novoa said.

  “Or any other way,” Dinithi said.

  “An avalanche is generally dirt and debris sliding down a mountainside. Not a pile of rocks tumbling outward like they were tossed by giants.” Zhou paused, and Tevin could tell Zhou was pausing for effect. “To get the kind of rock pile you have there from an avalanche would mean that the entire area from the base of the mountain through the water to the trench would be covered in loose rocks.”

  “Plus, we would know about the avalanche,” Dinithi said as if she understood.

  “Not if it had happened hundreds of years ago, although the ground itself would give us that message,” Zhou said. “Right now, Mushtaq and I have found no evidence of an avalanche on this side of the waterfall.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and cut off the rest of the questions. He signaled that his team should swim forward and down ever so slightly.

  Dinithi tilted downward, her body so lit up that the water around her looked almost white. She swam just a hair too close to the rocks, and as Tevin opened his mouth to warn her, she used the water to push herself backward in an almost involuntary movement.

  She didn’t scream—they were all too well-trained to scream—but her body screamed for her.

  “What is it?” Novoa asked as she swam toward the rock pile. Then she sucked in air so audibly that it sounded like a gasp.

  Tevin swam forward as well. He turned on his bright headlamp and pointed his chin downward.

  Rocks, jagged and pointed, and lots of moving plants, growing in between. Moving plants and—

  He let out a little puff of air, and his heart rate went up. His suit warned him that he was sensing danger.

  He didn’t want to correct it. Because the danger was long past. He was seeing something, not sensing anything at all.

  Bits of cloth, bones. Skulls. Bodies, underneath rocks. Real rocks, maybe weighing the bodies down initially, or maybe just piled on them because—

  Oh, hell, he didn’t know why.

  Bodies.

  He counted at least five skulls. And there might be more going down deeper in that trench.

  His mind couldn’t quite handle the discovery. His heart rate had spiked, his breathing was uneven, and his fight-or-flight response was still active.

  Primitive responses. He knew it, but his body still wanted him to leave.

  He took a deep breath, then nodded at the women.

  “We’re going back up,” he said.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  “BASSIMA BECK?”

  Bassima started, her eyes popping open. She had fallen asleep after all. She mentally kicked herself. It had been a long time since she had pulled an all-nighter, and she was clearly no longer used to doing it.

  Dwight wasn’t at his desk, but the people manning the other five desks were staring at her. Or rather, at the person who had spoken to her.

  He was slightly behind her, beside the arm of the uncomfortable couch. Which, apparently, hadn’t been uncomfortable enough.

  She stood, quickly and awkwardly, and found herself towering over him. She could see the tiny bald spot on the crown of his head. His black-and-silver hair swirled around it, like spices in a particularly well made cupcake.

  He looked up at her, clearly not uncomfortable with her height. And why would he be? He was probably used to people being taller than him. Maybe not looming over him the way she did, but taller nonetheless.

  He held out a hand. “I’m Gian Nicoleau. I head security here at the sector base.”

  The head of security had come to see her? Now that was a surprise. Something very important was happening here.

  She took his hand and shook it gently.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt you, sir,” she said. “I was making a simple inquiry about—”

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “And sometimes the simplest inquiries are the most complex. Please come with me. I need to speak to you in private.”

  She frowned. No one had ever offered to take her deeper into the base. If anything, they had tried to keep her away from the rest of the base.

  “Sure,” she said, wondering only half-humorously if she was dreaming. Because this was odd by any measure.

  He waved his hand at the wall, and a small door opened behind him. As she stepped through that door, she realized it was extremely thick. In the city of Sandoveil, the door would be called a blast door.

  The corridor he led her into was wide and arched. It had comfortable, light blue walls and more of that overhead lighting that mimicked sunlight. Compared to the entry, this part of the sector base felt accommodating.

  He led her through three different corridors, all of
which looked the same. Fortunately, she had had that small nap, so she could keep track of where she was. She had a hunch other people got turned around very easily here.

  He opened a door that was opaque, like the wall in the main entrance, and revealed a small meeting room. A seating arrangement with several chairs huddled against one wall; another, with a round table and four chairs, stood near some cabinets.

  Obviously, this wasn’t his office. She was probably nowhere near the real security center in the sector base. This was a meeting area designed for outsiders who couldn’t go in the restricted parts.

  He swept a hand toward the table.

  “Please,” he said. “Sit.”

  She sat at the round table, in a chair with a view of the door. It was no longer opaque, but clear, so that anyone in the corridor could see the meeting going on inside here.

  He sat in the chair closest to hers, so that anyone passing in the corridor could see that he was in this meeting.

  “You were asking about Glida Kimura,” he said. “May I ask why?”

  Bassima almost felt like a suspect herself. And yet nothing in his tone implied it. Her feeling came from his posture, which was both on edge and wary, while pretending to be relaxed.

  For a moment she hesitated, wondering how much information to share. Then she decided to play it by ear. He was the head of security here and she did have permission to loop him in, so she could tell him anything.

  She would decide as the conversation progressed if he needed to know everything.

  “We have reason to believe that Glida Kimura murdered her wife, Taji Kimura, two days ago,” Bassima said. “I tracked Glida here. Her vehicle is outside, and as far as I can tell, she hasn’t left here since she arrived.”

  Something twitched in his face. He didn’t hide information well; at least, he didn’t hide it well from people who knew how to observe.

  She decided not to dance around. She was too tired for that.

  “Am I wrong about that?” she asked.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s a bit trickier than that. May I ask a few questions before I answer yours?”